


You lose some, you win some

by maybeillride



Category: Free!
Genre: A Ridiculous Amt of Texting, F/M, Gen, Gift Fic, Las Vegas, Lawyer!Sousuke, M/M, Multi, Sousuke's Birthday Bash, Yamazaki Sousuke's Birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 03:24:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8040643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybeillride/pseuds/maybeillride
Summary: Sousuke's spending his 30th on the other side of the world. His friends aren't gonna let him get away THAT easy.





	You lose some, you win some

**Author's Note:**

  * For [popnographic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popnographic/gifts).



> Having Sousuke's and popnographic's birthdays happen within 24 hours of each other is the equivalent of Jupiter entering Saturn's orbit, or something. It's also bloody convenient, given that i've been dying to write something for possibly the sweetest all-around person here on ao3. Happy happy birthday, you deserve it! <3

“Bu-bye now!” the flight attendant tells Sousuke, beaming a smile at him as he squeezes past that somehow is as fresh as it was when he squeezed past going the other way… oh, some 15 hours and 57 minutes ago. Not that he’s counting. GOD, he’d thought he was so clever getting a nonstop flight. He even brought a stack of briefs to work on, a model of productivity. Fucking hilarious. Instead, he spent the flight slowly and inexorably losing his mind. By the end his seatmate had passed over her stack of trashy gossip magazines to try to get him to stop fidgeting.

And if he happened to find himself weirdly invested in Taylor Swift’s latest break-up, he could blame his delirium.

On his weary way to find a taxi, Sousuke’s tunnel vision is so intense he practically runs into his own name, floating in the air like a thought-bubble in a manga.

“Sousuke Yamazaki?” the driver asks, tall and weirdly intimidating in a black suit and leveling him with a totally emotionless stare that would have Haru drooling with envy. He blinks back.

“There must be a mistake, I didn’t order a car,” he starts. 

“No, sir. Your ride was reserved by a Ms. Matsuoka.” She tucks the sign bearing his name under one arm and calmly pulls the rear door open on a glossy black limousine. He blinks again at the ridiculously-ostentatious thing.

“S’pose it’s too late to say no?” he tries – he knows how much Gou makes. 

“Happy birthday, sir,” the driver says in a perfect monotone, and he sighs and ducks in. It’s even more ridiculous on the inside.

He has an empty cocktail glass in one hand and the ice scoop in the other when his phone blares from his pocket. He manages to fumble it to his ear before the call can slip away to voicemail.

“Hiiii, guy!” Gou sounds tired – it’s late in Tokyo, 16 hours ahead of… whenever the hell it is here in Vegas. But he feels the familiar warmth in her voice almost like she’s wrapping an arm around his waist, and he’s jabbed with a quick stab of little-kid need. “Happy-almost-birthday!!”

He marvels at his first glimpse of the lightshow that’s the Vegas Strip, hardly dimmed a notch despite the limo’s blackout windows. “You enjoy being a troublemaker, don’t you.”

She snorts, and he hears the blaring theme music of something or other, and he pictures her tucked in bed, with her hair down over the mountain of pillows she likes.

“You deserve to be pampered and that’s the best I could think of. How was the flight?”

“ _Never_ a-fucking-again. Screw you, America,” he swears like it’s a wedding vow.

“I’m sorry, ugh. I don’t know how Rin puts up with it,” she says. He leans his head back into the seat cushion and sighs, silently, so she can’t hear it. The TV theme music on her end cuts off abruptly. “But anyway. I’m just so bummed you can’t have your big 3-0 here, with us. Who planned this stupid conference? Couldn’t they schedule around you? Sheesh.”

“Lawyers. Hey. Whatd’ya call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?”

She flips it back to him so fast he wishes he’d picked a less-obvious lawyer joke. “A good start. God, that’s morbid. So what are you gonna do to celebrate tomorrow?”

“Oh, spend the night in my room rereading the conference guide. Take some notes. Maybe go nuts and crack the minibar.”

“The scariest part is that I’m not sure if you’re kidding.” She yawns, long and gusty with a squeak on the end. “You better not.”

“Go to sleep, Gou,” Sousuke smiles at the sleepy redhead in his mind’s-eye. “…thanks again, you really didn’t have to do that.”

“I sure did. Love you. Dinner’s on me when you’re back.”

*

He’s in his king-sized bed 45 minutes later, so tired he’s almost staggering his way into a third wind and is trying to beat his consciousness back into submission, when his cell pings with a text on the mattress beside him.

He fumbles the brightness down after scalding his eyeballs in the darkness. It’s from Makoto, no message but a video attached and waiting for him, and he knows he should turn his screen back off so he has some hope of eking out a few hours’ sleep. But he hits play without hesitation. He blames it on the warmth in Gou’s voice, filling him up with thoughts of home.

Makoto’s video is seasick-shaky, at least until he can get it level and trained back on him and a strangely-familiar blond next to him. It’s dark on the screen, but in a cozy, friendly way, and Sousuke immediately recognizes their favorite izakaya, even the figure of the bartender chatting up customers behind them.

Makoto is flushed and handsome and happy, his grin big enough to eat up the lower half of his face. “Sousuke! Happy 30th!! Or – it is over here, anyway.” His mysteriously familiar companion interrupts and that’s how Sousuke recognizes Kisumi, his first look at him in over ten years.

“Hey, man! Can you believe it, I’m in Tokyo, _finally_ , and here you are in freaking Las Vegas. I guess there’s a conspiracy to keep us separated.” They laugh and Sousuke’s so struck, it’s his present self in Makoto and his past self in Kisumi coming through his phone’s shitty speaker, and he’s sleep-stupid enough he almost starts replying to the screen before he catches himself.

“Well we’re gonna make up for lost time when you get back, okay?” Makoto says in his big-brother voice, and raises a glass into the blurred foreground. “We’re drinking a toast to you in the meantime.”

“Don’t bring back anything contagious!” Kisumi caws, and then the screen jostles and twirls down, pointing at what might be a giant pair of Converse. The video ends.

Shigino goddamn Kisumi, bigger and blonder (???) than life. Someone more fanciful would probably mark this occasion as fate, cosmic unfinished business. Sousuke’s wondering instead what the hell this could mean, for his thing with Makoto, with Haru, hell, with Gou for that matter. But sorta like his previous existence in Sousuke’s life, Kisumi just – defies explanation. It’s like he’s always been there, drinking and stupid-yelling next to Makoto. Challenging Sousuke to some unknown duel the next time they see each other… in the flesh, and not limited by the dinky confines of his phone’s screen...

His big clumsy thumb opens a new reply to Makoto on its own, as he finally loses his battle with consciousness.

*

There’s a ping, and something vibrates his left pec suddenly enough he pops up, gasping in that awful morning-heart-attack way. His phone has fallen into his lap. 

He cranes blearily back, shocked to see it’s 11AM. Thank God the first day doesn’t start until noon with the welcome lunch, which he would’ve probably otherwise slept right through.

It’s Haru, Haru who basically never texts, Haru who has open scorn for his text-a-thons with Makoto, texting him at… sometime in the middle of the night in Tokyo, anyway. He drops his phone on the nightstand and heads into the bathroom for a quick shower, in a room that could probably fit the entirety of his college apartment.

He finally allows himself to click the screen back on once he’s clean, dressed, and groomed enough to meet the illogical standards of a ballroom full of ambulance-chasers. Haru’s actually shot him two more texts in the meantime. He blinks.

_Seahorses are slow. If I was in the ocean, I would not be a gambler on the horse races … because you would be there fuckin’ days._

And

_I ran some Evian water through a filter… the shit disappeared! It was so fuckin’ pure._

And finally –

_I like the public hot tub at the hotels, the whirlpool. I like to go there when there’s a guy in there already and say “Hey, man, you mind if I join ya?” And he says “no.” Then I go and I turn the whirlpool heat up. Then I come by and I add some carrots and onions…_

And he’s laughing, confused and certain at the same time, because shit, if that doesn’t just summarize Haru to a T. Sousuke would almost think he was writing high, if he didn’t know him. No, Haru comes by his stoner brain naturally. And, of course, the first time he decides to pick up his phone and actually communicate with Sousuke in earnest, and he turns out to be a goddamn terrible standup comic.

He rereads them all, laughing again, knowing if there was a seahorse racetrack, Haru would fucking _live_ there. He makes no move to reply. Clearly Haru’s not expecting one.

The welcome lunch and first few sessions of the conference are right downstairs, which is fortunate as he finally drags his ass out of his palatial room at a minute to 12. It’s all very nice, and tasteful, and boring. He applauds the keynote (some dude who wrote a book on how to make being Japanese work for and not against you in the courtroom, or some contrived gimmicky bullshit that passes unchecked through Sousuke’s consciousness). He eats an unremarkable Kobe steak. He makes nice with the other lawyers at his table, a woman from San Francisco and two other guys from Tokyo, who he compares flight notes with. They all seem impressed by him, in that grudging nonverbal way lawyers use in lieu of showing actual vulnerability. 

And all along, he willfully ignores the insistent buzz of his phone as it marks off text after text in the breast pocket of his blazer. After about the tenth or so – he’s lost count – he’s decided he can’t stand it anymore, and ducks into the bathroom as soon as they’re let out of the last seminar of the day.

There’s a text from his sister, and a missed call from his folks’ landline with a voicemail to match. There’s a nice group text from his whole crew at the firm. There’s a pile of Facebook notifications that he doesn’t open. And everything else is stacked neatly under Haru’s name.

_I like rice. Rice is great if you want to eat 2,000 of something._

_I don’t have a microwave oven, but I do have a clock that occasionally cooks shit._

_I would like to go fishing and catch a fish stick. That would be convenient._

_People think I’m into sports just because I’m a man. I’m not into sports. I mean, I like Gatorade, but that’s about as far as it goes._

_On a traffic light, green means go and yellow means yield. But on a banana, it’s just the opposite. Green means “hold on” and yellow means “go ahead.” And red means “where the fuck did you get that banana?”_

_I like vending machines… because snacks are better when they fall. If I go buy a candy bar in a store, often times I will drop it, so it reaches its maximum flavor potential._

And on a related note,

_I want to make a vending machine that sells vending machines. It would have to be real fucking big._

Sousuke leans against the stall wall, locked in and grinning stupidly down at his phone. If the guy having a moment next to him finds his suppressed giggling suspicious he doesn’t say anything, for which he’s grateful. Clearly Haru was having his morning mackerel as he wrote, and Sousuke is honestly surprised the dude is capable of that many thoughts about food.

The vending machine jokes, though. He’s not surprised to see THOSE.

*

Sousuke decides to sample the casino in his hotel after dinner, and is confident he’ll be done in an hour, max, and can make an early night of it. He’s so exhausted, so _done_ , his body is a guy-marionette that his brain is very badly marching from place to place. He’s become basically nonverbal on top of that, but the slots of course don’t need you to be a sparkling conversationalist. It’s overly-bright even by Shinjuku standards and about 100 times more depressing.

He finds himself recoiling from the screaming banks of slot machines and sits at a poker table almost without intending to. He fumbles out his money for way too many chips, because he doesn’t want to look cheap. It’s a little shocking to see just how small a couple hundred dollars look when transformed into a stack of colored plastic. He keeps a straight face and tries to pretend like he belongs there as the dealer doles out the hand.

He leads off with a few losses. And then the familiar righteous anger bubbles into his gut, his chest, that courtroom _fuck you_  feeling, and he leans into the table with new resolve. Vegas wasn’t gonna beat him. He was gonna beat the casino at its own stupid game.

Time blurs. The casino has a no-phone policy so he has no frame of reference, just riding the sudden wins and getting a little thrill with every onlooker who gives him a congratulatory back-slap. His colorful stacks inch higher. The cocktail waitresses start to pass by more frequently and he has a beer, a gin and tonic, another one. A woman crowds in next to him, falling out of her V-neck and trailing a long nail along his arm in a way he finds intensely annoying. (He thinks she’s calling him “Mr. Bond” but she’s slurring enough he isn’t sure.)

That’s why it’s so frustrating when his stacks start to shrink. A giant, stone faced guy with an even better poker face than Sousuke joins the table, and all his rightful wins begin landing in the other guy’s lap instead. The woman hasn’t budged from Sousuke’s side, but even she seems a little morose.

The first chance he gets, he cashes out and retreats. The game starts up again behind him. He’s grateful that at least he’s only down twenty bucks, somehow, but it’s small comfort considering the unknown riches he just lost.

His room is dark when he stalks in. The Strip glows and flashes outside his window-wall. He’s dumping his shirt on the bed when he notices the two lights on the bedside table, his cell flashing blue and the room phone glowing red.

*

Fifteen minutes later, Sousuke lets himself back into his room. He leaves a trail of business casual to his little carryon suitcase and stretches on the bed in a beat-up old pair of sweatpants. He breaks into the Gatorade and Snickers bar he got on his way. Finally, _finally_ , he swipes open his phone.

Haru’s still being “Haru.” But a little truth has crept in, maybe unconsciously, maybe by design. Sousuke’s tired grin slowly softens as he reads.

_You know when you go to concerts, and the kids get on stage and they jump into the crowd, stage diving? People think that’s dangerous, but not me. Because humans are made out of 95% water. So the audience is 5% away from a pool._

_You know when they show someone on TV washing their hair under a waterfall? That’s fuckin’ bullshit, man. Because that thing would knock you on your ass._

…and

_I’m a mumbler. If I’m walking with a friend and I say something, he won’t hear me, he’ll say “What?” So I’ll say it again, but once again, he doesn’t hear me, so he says “What?!” But really, it’s just some insignificant shit that I’m saying, but now I’m yelling “That tree is far away!”_

_I want to climb a mountain, not so I can get to the top, because I want to hang out at base camp. That seems fuckin’ fun as shit. You sleep in a colorful tent, you grow a beard, you drink hot chocolate, you walk around. “Hey, you going to the top?” “Soon.”_

_You know, I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just gonna ask where they’re going and hook up with ‘em later._

and

_I wish all my clothes were made out of blankets. That way, if I fall asleep with my clothes on, fuckin’ A, I’m tucked in._

_When I was a boy, I laid in my twin size bed and wondered where my brother was._

_I got a king size bed. I don’t know any kings, but if one came over, I guess he would be comfortable._

Sousuke reads that last again, and again, and leans his head back into his mound of pillows. He closes his eyes, drawing the picture of Haru in his mind, tucked into his (very-not king-sized bed) at his apartment and sleepily stirring as Sousuke carefully eases himself in the door.

He holds the phone out without thinking about it, clicking a picture of himself in his Vegas-sized hotel bed. There’s nothing graphic about the selfie – it’s just bare chest and shoulders, messy hair, and an “oh, really” skeptical look in the shitty light of the bedside lamp. But he and Haru have their own particular codes and shorthand, as much as Haru and Makoto do, and he knows Haru will get his message.

His heartbeat is still higher than it should be as he turns to the envelope he picked up from the desk clerk downstairs. He doesn’t know how it’s here, who told Rin where the hell he’d be (even though his best bet is on Makoto). He doesn’t know what forced Rin to sit his ass down for a change. He rips the envelope open.

There’s a T-Rex skeleton on the front of the card. Sousuke knows the lame joke that’s coming, and isn’t disappointed when he reads “Thinking of You” in flowy greeting card script on the inside. He picks up the photo that’s dropped onto his chest, holding it up with the sweetest sort of déjà vu.

It’s a Polaroid, creased and faded, from the summer their families sent them to Robot Camp together. He remembers the day like it was, yes, a Polaroid picture – Rin on the left with the lopsided haircut he gave himself, Sousuke on the right, swimming in a way-too-big neon green tank top. They each have an arm thrown around the robot they built together, a trashcan on wheels that Rin called R2 (Sousuke would come back with D-Poo and get punched for his wit). Sousuke thinks they look almost manically proud, like a couple of gay robot-dads.

“Thinking of You,” the card says, and under that Rin has scrawled, in his angular printing –

_HEY SOUSUKE, happy *30th*! How is that possible. How are you THIRTY. Because if you’re 30, you’re a damn adult, and if you’re an adult so am I, and therefore we can’t do stupid shit like buy a dozen eggs and making the mother of all omarice and getting SO sick the next day. (remember that??)_

_But enough about food, you didn’t ask for a card from Nagisa. I’m really sorry I can’t celebrate your birthday with you like we used to. I’m sorry I’ve been MIA, too. i miss you and your dumbass jokes. I have a break coming up at the end of October and I got a ticket home. SO you better get ready for me!_

_Love,_   
_Rin_

**Author's Note:**

> All props to the brilliantly skewed Minnesota comedian Mitch Hedberg (RIP), whose [stand-up](https://www.buzzfeed.com/mrloganrhoades/a-complete-ranking-of-almost-every-single-mitch-hedberg-joke?utm_term=.gq60WG2Gk#.qkRjLx3xm) i used for every one of Haru's texts. (I couldn't resist. This guy was Haru incarnate.)
> 
> Equal props to popnographic whose grasp on these characters in her fics is so uncanny, Kyoani should've hired her <3
> 
> AND thanks to you for reading!!


End file.
